"I don't know if our house is still there," said Jerry Schiff, a resident who said he quickly packed what he could before heading to safety at a nearby evacuation center set up by the Red Cross. "I saw a 40-foot wall of orange and said, 'We got to get out of here.'"

Monterey County Sheriff Scott Miller said the lack of rain contributed significantly to the rapid spread of the fire. The Big Sur area, which normally records several inches of precipitation in the fall, got less than a half-inch since July, according to the Chronicle.